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Life After Affiliate Marketing – ShoeMoney October Recap

Posted: 05 Nov 2014 06:43 AM PST

This is the October ShoeMoney Recap. As always if you want to skip my normal F.R.A.T (f#ck reading all that) then just scroll to the bottom to see the posts from October.

If you have been following along you know that I have had a lot of changes since July. I Moved out of my downtown office back to my house. Raised money for the PAR Program and have A new joint ventured on a new company called Market Notify with the founders of one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces online and another party that built one of the largest self service email platforms out there. I really only bring up Market Notify cause its relevant to the end of this email.

Its been a very very very busy summer and early fall but all the pieces are falling into place.

Today I wanna talk to you about something that I really been thinking about lately.

Life after affiliate marketing.

Not that this is the affiliate marketing industry as a whole but its my thoughts and I think many others would concur quite a bit.

Lemme preface by saying of all the money I have made online, aside from my sale of my advertising network, 90% of it has come from the affiliate marketing industry. My prime years were from 2006-2010.

Affiliate Marketing gave me a huge nest egg and I tried to leave the roost to build a big company. I tried several things and while I made money it was nothing compared to the routine, although month to month SPIKEY, 7 figure annual income I had as an affiliate marketer.

I guess I thought since I was so good at selling other people’s products and taking a small commission through affiliate marketing, selling my own services would be that much sweeter.

But it didn’t like I thought it would. Actually didn’t go very well. Again I still profited, but honestly spent most of my time VERY frustrated with growth and managing employees.

Why was I so good at selling other people’s products and services but not that good with my own?

I came up with a couple key things.

The “what do I care its not my product”.

Ima be pretty honest here. As an affiliate I made a TON of money off of products I never purchased for myself or would recommend to anyone. I didn’t really even care what it was. I made money selling ringtone subscriptions, pharmaceuticals, diet stuff, teeth whitening, god you name it. Even frickin netflix. All of which I never even tried myself.

As an affiliate marketer you have to come up with a better way to sell a product than the company can to make money.

So you come up with unique angles. Fake blogs, *cough* semi misleading ads , review sites, and other creative gray area tactics.

The bottom line is you do what that company is not willing to do. Whether its morally, ethically, or even sometimes legally.

When its your own product or service now you are the big brand and I was not 10% as aggressive in tactics in selling my own product or service as I had been as an affiliate. I knew I had to deal with returns if people were mislead. Damage to my brand from sketchy marketing tactics and other random customer service issues that could come from that.

Immediate gratification.

In the affiliate marketing industry no matter which side your on (publisher/advertiser) you are used to immediate results. You spend a grand and in literally minutes you know if what you are doing is making money and tweak from there and go balls out or move on to the next thing. You get your money owed to you very fast and you never have to worry about refunds (in most cases).

When its your own product or service it takes a lot of time. And often that means running at a loss when you start. You can’t just jump ship and move on to something else…. although I have done that with a few things. I don’t have many regrets but I have built a couple amazing services that I abandoned pretty quickly after investing hundreds of thousands of dollars when I got to frustrated with the speed at which they were growing.

Doing everything myself.

The most successful affiliate marketers I know are guys that can do everything themselves. Sometimes its a couple guys and sometimes one. I know how to program, do graphics, write copy, you name it. I can get a lander up and running or a custom app or whatever in hours at the most. I had a great partner in David Dellanave who was as obsessive as I was in busting stuff out where I needed help programing wise and the biggest reason why AuctionAds was so successful. What we did together in that company in such short of time was amazing.

Side note: David and I parted ways in 2010 and he went on to follow his passion in physical fitness. He is now one of the most respected people in the space running his Movement Minneapolis gym and services.

When you run a company you hit a lot of wheel spin. This is by far for me the most frustrating part. Waiting 3 days for a graphic or some basic programing or whatever when I wanna get this shit done in the next hour. DRIVES ME INSANE. Often times I jump in and just do it. Cause I want it done now. Then 3 days later they send it to me and I am like never mind I already did it. Ya I know… Not the way to run a company.

Customer pipeline and lag time.

Again my lack of patients will show here. With the PAR Program often times on sales calls I get frustrated with how many times we have to have calls. In my head I am like JUST FUCKING SIGN LETS GO. But thats not how it works with a publicly traded company that is about to sign a contract for 5 figures a month. Thats a many months of calls to have a chance to sign them. And it drives me insane. I have actually told numerous people after several calls that our services are just not for them. “We have the case studies, we have gone over this X many times. We are the best. Period. If you are still on the fence then go sign with some piker service and we will see you in 6 months when you realized you totally wasted your money”.

Yes I have actually said that. And in several cases they do come back to us. But again very frustrating for me coming from that affiliate mindset.

So how do I get away from the definition of insanity (keep doing the same thing over expecting a different result).

I really had to think about this long and hard. I REALLY don’t want to go back to the swings of affiliate marketing although I would be stupid to not leverage all my experience from that.

My biggest success as a “company” was the AuctionAds Advertising network but we also teamed up with a great CEO that ran the day to day operations.

So in my perfect world… I would partner up with a proven CEO to manage day to day operations (and employees), a CTO to manage developers and a great overall marketer.

I would be left to do what I am really good at and find unique angles to really grow the new company rapidly.

And after a lot of searching and ALMOST merging with several companies I found the right group of guys. We are only a few months into it and transitioning is going well but the PAR Program revenue has almost doubled since we got together and the Market Notify platform is rocking development wise and should be letting in beta users shortly.

If you want to make sure you have beta access get your email in at MarketNotify.com

And now I give you the October ShoeMoney Recap! Have a great November and be safe over the holidays!

P.S. I know I’ve been a little lapsed in writing but been traveling and grinding with this new venture. I have a lot of great content I will be posting soon.

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